Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  The deified Lenin provided Stalin with a cloak of invincibility. By appropriating Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s reputation and parroting his ideas—until they no longer suited his own purposes—Stalin made himself Lenin’s natural successor. The very screenplay that Stalin was now outlining took its inspiration from Lenin’s statement that “of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important.” With an illiterate population in the millions, the fastest and easiest way to acquaint them with the modern world and with socialist values was through film. Lenin had, to his credit, ordered that special trains be outfitted with cameras and screens. They would stop at innumerable hamlets and villages to show propaganda films in the form of newsreels. The movie Stalin currently envisioned also had an agitprop purpose. The world would know how, despite the poisoners in his midst, he had made Russia great again.

  He began an imaginary conversation with Lenin.

  “You tried to humiliate me,” he said to Vladimir, “when you picked Trotsky as your successor, but in the end I triumphed.”

  Lenin shook his head. “Your shame is self-inflicted.”

  “Do you blame me for the beatings I endured as a child at the hands of a drunken father? Even my mother whipped me.”

  “Others suffered worse hardships.”

  In a spasm of self-pity, Stalin cried, “I was shorter than Trotsky. I had a crippled arm and a scarred face. Smallpox. And a—”

  “Go ahead, say it. The fact can’t be denied.”

  Here Stalin paused to remember. At the Tiflis seminary, unless granted leave, the students spent weekends in prayer and liturgical song in the church. Evenings, the oblates served tea at eight o’clock, after which the boys studied in their classrooms. Once a week, the students bathed for three minutes in hot water, taking turns in the one large limestone tub. By the time the last boy washed, the water was cold and filthy. Even so, Stalin always aimed to be last. With fewer boys in the bathhouse, he hoped, by covering his genitals with his hands, to escape their favorite taunt:

  What you have there is no Venus,

  Just a wrinkled stumpy penis.

  At night the supervisors policed the sleeping quarters to be sure the boys were not reading secular newspapers or books in secret by candlelight. Then they searched the wooden boxes next to the beds for contraband, and randomly checked the sleeping quarters to ensure the boys were not indulging in “self-pollution.”

  “No need to check on Dzhugashvili,” said the supervisor, who bore Stalin no love. “His wee-wee is too small to rub.”

  At ten o’clock, all kerosene lamps and candles were extinguished, leaving the seminarians walled in rock.

  “Do you see, Ilyich, how your favoring Trotsky and the supervisor’s insult hardly differed? The supervisor’s words stung all the more owing to the presence of the other boys, and your testament diminished me in the eyes of the party. You both made me feel small and unworthy. Not a day passes that I don’t wish I could refashion myself. Nature poisoned me with not only webbed toes on my left foot, dwarfish height, and a pockmarked face, but also with a small penis. The supervisor would laugh salaciously and move to the next bed.” Stalin shivered. Using his one good arm, he managed to pull the blanket off the divan. “You drove me into the cold with your accusations.” He covered himself with the blanket, and then implored, “Why Trotsky?”

  “For all his arrogance, Trotsky is the better leader. He doesn’t have to surround himself with shorter men to feel important.”

  Stalin decided to cut this conversation from his movie. A moment later he heard footsteps softly approaching. One of his guards entered the room. Where was he earlier? The man asked if Comrade Stalin had taken ill. Could he help? He then left and returned with another guard. The two men lifted Stalin and put him back on the divan. Stalin made some gurgling sounds, which suggested a stroke had deprived him of speech, and yet his thoughts remained lucid. The house servants wanted to call a doctor. A look of terror flashed across Stalin’s face. No, not a physician. Had he not sentenced his own personal doctor, Professor Vladimir Vinogradov, to prison for recommending that the Vozhd, who had suffered several small strokes, take a break from his countless responsibilities? Doctors! All of them murderers.

  The guards decided to move Stalin from this cramped and stuffy room to one of the sofas in the large, airy dining room. Three men gently carried him to a white brocaded couch with scrolled arms and rolled bolsters. Although he lay motionless, he surveyed the familiar room, from the great, soft Iranian rug to the hanging light fixtures. This long and spacious hall, rounded at one end with identical windows and heavy white drapes that he had ordered shortened at the bottom by thirty centimeters to prevent an unseen intruder from hiding behind them, brought to mind the innumerable dinners here. Covered in a dark green billiard baize cover, the table ran the length of the room and had often accommodated one hundred and fifty to two hundred people in hard armchairs of light-colored wood. Recalling working dinners with members of the Politburo, he could hear—or was he only imagining?—his waiters bringing the food through the long passageway from the kitchen annex. And he could see the mostly Georgian dishes, served on heavy silver platters, and the beverages, vodka and wine, all of which had already been subject to a food taster. “Sit where you like,” he would tell his guests, but always reserved for himself the same chair: the one to the left of the head of the table.

  On a small stand next to the wall rested two telephones, a black one for ordinary calls and a white one, the hot line. When using the telephone, he would sit in a low chair that enabled him to plant his legs firmly on the floor. Normal chairs ill-suited his five-feet, four-inch height. From this dwarf chair, he had ordered the deaths of hundreds. The drapes were closed, preventing him from seeing outside to his cherished garden and greenhouses, where he would often roam at midnight and prune his beloved roses and cherry trees. In his cinematic imaginings, he could feel the warmth of summer and see among the pine-woods the guest villas, the gazebos, the bathhouse, and the cottage that housed his library. Soon all these pleasures would become a state museum with access to few, and he, a forgotten autocrat.

  A Chinese embroidery of a big, bright tiger peered down at him from one of the wood-paneled walls. In addition, the walls held cheap reproductions of enlarged magazine photographs of children playing at sports, running in the fields, and sitting under cherry trees, as well as drawings by the artist Yar-Kravchenko, who had sketched likenesses of eminent writers, and a reproduction of Repin’s famous Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire. High on the wall hung a small portrait of Lenin, who seemed ever to look down upon him. But for all of Lenin’s imperiousness, mused Stalin, if the old man could have seen this grand room, he would have thought twice about recommending Trotsky as his successor. Here abided success.

  Shutting his eyes, he seemed to fall asleep, or so his personal guards thought, and therefore left. The clock read 10:30. Hearing the door close, Stalin continued to compose his movie and flashed back to the night before. He and four members of the Politburo had retreated to the Kremlin projection room to watch two Soviet movies, which provided Koba the occasion to comment on the action and speak to the screen actors as if the movies depicted real and current events. The second film, which he particularly liked, concerned how the use of a tractor saved a collective farm from ruin and brought the hero and heroine together. After the movies, they took separate cars to his country house, Blizhny, just outside Moscow. They drove along the Arbat, joined the Minskoye Highway, passed by the Kievsky railway station, turned left just beyond Poklonnaya Hill, and immediately entered a thick forest. At the end of a long drive, guarded by numerous security men, they arrived at the sixteen-room dacha. The black Packard pulled up to a small door to the right of the formal entrance, which Stalin had always considered too grand. He entered and went straight to the kitchen to check on the menu. Then he joined his comrades in the large dining room, where he noted that Beria had brought along his own security man, Co
lonel Ivan Vasilievich Khrustalev. He substituted for one of Stalin’s normal guards, who had been mysteriously excused.

  The colonel would play a major role in the movie. Forty-six years old, Khrustalev had proved himself loyal and single-minded. What Beria ordered, Khrustalev executed. Tall and mustachioed, part Cossack, he fit the role of a warrior. His weight-lifting feats qualified him for the Olympics. Arm wrestling? He had lost but once, to a Bulgarian.

  Less than an hour earlier, he had made his presence known to Stalin in a way the Vozhd could not forget.

  “Thank you for thinking of me,” said Khrustalev, “but as you saw earlier, I have no need of a speech writer. In fact, I see no need to use quotation marks to identify what I say. Then I can’t be held accountable.”

  Indignant, Stalin replied, “This is my movie, not yours. And my words are quotable . . . for all time.”

  My story is best told by me, the colonel said, as he slithered into the frame and perched on the large dining room table. All I need is an editor, a job, according to rumor, you have often taken upon yourself for the best Russian poets, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, and film directors—even when unasked.

  “If you think that I will tell your story—you, a mere actor—I can assure you that I am not Luigi Pirandello.”

  Never heard of him. An army man?

  “An Italian dramatist. He wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

  Enough chitchat. You tell your story and I’ll tell mine.

  “If you won’t stay silent and let me talk for you—”

  I won’t!

  “Then I’ll cut the scene.”

  Facts are not transient lodgers; they’re always resident.

  Stalin could hear a log crackling in the fireplace and a plane in the distance. He remembered the pilot who had told him that whenever flying over the dacha, he dipped his wings to honor the Vozhd. When Stalin asked him how he could identify his dacha from the air, the pilot replied that he could see the stream that ran through the garden. The next day, the Boss ordered a division of sappers to divert the brook. It now ran two kilometers away.

  I think you’ll want to expand my role in the story.

  “I already know it.”

  Not all.

  The colonel then explained.

  The night of February 28, Comrade Beria called me to his house. I used to pick up young girls for him, but that’s another story. He told me my time had come. At first, I thought he intended to arrest me. But when he smiled, I knew that this was the night. He would be dining at Blizhny, and I would accompany him. Indeed, my time had come, my time for revenge. Having grown up in Yaroslavl, I had lost several family members in the July 1918 Rebellion. You, Comrade Stalin, had no hand in the raid, but you knew all about later events. Let me apprise the putative viewers of your film.

  A number of conservative activists tried by force of arms to remove the newly installed Yaroslavl Bolshevik municipal authorities. The Red Army surrounded the city and bombarded it with artillery and aircraft, killing hundreds and destroying or damaging at least two thousand buildings before hostilities ended. But the story continues. You, Comrade Stalin, have a long memory and a murderously spiteful streak. In the 1930s, you initiated a purge in which my parents, owing to their friendship with some of the rebels, were arrested. They were then transported to Siberia, where they died in the coal mines. My sister and I went to an orphanage. An army security man adopted us and later enabled me to enter the military. The man had a daughter, a young woman of rare beauty whom death and time cannot efface. She and I grew to love one another and eventually married.

  Alas, the government assigned me to work hither and yon. I rarely saw her. My wife was pregnant and needed me, but the secret police insisted I place nation before newborn. By the time I reached her bedside, the baby had died. In despair, my wife swallowed poison. As her breath faltered, I cradled her head against my chest. A day later, I wasn’t allowed time to attend her funeral because of an order canceling all leaves for security personnel. Reason: The Vozhd feared an assassination attempt. If I have digressed, I’m sure your audience will forgive me. You see, I have never forgotten—nor forgiven—the death of my parents and my wife. I swore that one day I would see justice done. You can fill in the details as your mind camera rolls. To return to the story of February 28 and March 1 . . . I drove Beria and Malenkov to the dacha.

  Quite a bleak sight: wide front, two stories, camouflage green, rows of windows, two pillars on either side of the front door, numerous checkpoints and guardhouses, soldiers seemingly in the hundreds, barbed wire barriers, even on the dacha roof. Icy roads slowed the drive from the Kremlin to Kuntsevo. Once we cleared all the checkpoints, we crunched through the snow and cold to the dacha. Your house guards met us at the door and kindly took our coats and hats. I told the soldier in charge that I would assume his responsibilities. On whose orders? he asked. Lavrenty Beria’s, I told him. Do you wish to speak to him personally, or in his capacity as Minister of Internal Affairs? He’s just arrived. The man backed away and vanished from sight.

  We walked down the long hall to the large dining room. Comrade Beria told me that you barred all observers from your dinners, and that I should position myself in the adjacent room and listen from there. I heard you say, “Eleven! Time to eat.” But then you like late dinners that run into the early morning, and this one certainly did. Your waiters—notice I didn’t say servants, a word you admirably despise—brought numerous dishes to the table.

  A dazed Stalin wondered whether the colonel was a chimera or whether he really had conversed with him earlier. To test his senses, he asked the colonel to remove himself from the table and sit on a chair, thus proving his materiality.

  As you wish, said the colonel, seating himself.

  “Do you have any idea who dined at the long table you are perched on? World leaders.”

  And now that’s all finished.

  Stalin studied the colonel’s face for a moment. “How did you evade my taster?”

  We knew about your water pitcher and iodine.

  “Beria engineered this plot, didn’t he?”

  The man’s an architect. He knows all about planning.

  “And about me.”

  The dossier he keeps on you makes for voluminous reading. But then so too do the dossiers he keeps on the other Politburo members.

  “That slimy gray toad.”

  Save the epithets for later, Comrade Stalin.

  “Your impertinence and trespassing, Colonel, won’t go unpunished. You’ll be shot.”

  Then be so kind as to allow a condemned man to show you his own movie. It is based on what I observed this evening. The scenes I mentally filmed befit a biblical Last Supper. Feel free to add or subtract from it, in your editorial role.

  “I am the movie aficionado, not you.”

  Ignoring the Vozhd, the colonel previewed his film. You may wish to close your eyes to see it better. In my script, I take the liberty of omitting formalities and using the familiar “You”; and in some places, I have added a voice-over.

  The opening scene has the guests oohing and aahing over the different aromas issuing from the Georgian dishes. As you prefer, all the food is brought to the table at once: the appetizers, the main courses, the desserts, and of course the drinks. Each of the guests serves himself. The cold appetizers include your favorite, herring. The menu also includes shchi (subtitle: soup made from fresh cabbage or sauerkraut) and kharcho (subtitle: Caucasian spicy stew made from lamb, rice, and tomatoes). Your comrades drink themselves silly on vodka, while you sip fruit juice.

  “To observe their behavior,” adds Stalin, “and listen to their loose tongues. In vino veritas.”

  Like so many other dinners at your dacha, this night you take pleasure in humiliating your guests. You squash a tomato on Beria’s head, put a raw egg on Malenkov’s chair, spike Bulganin’s vodka with white wine, causing him nearly to vomit, and order Khrushchev to perform a Ukrainian dance, though his
knees can hardly support him. The phonograph—

  “A gift from Churchill,” Stalin says proudly. “I had it brought into the large dining room.”

  As it plays records of sentimental Georgian and Ukrainian music, you reminisce about your childhood. Your mother, in particular, holds a special spot in your heart, and you grow maudlin as you recount how you failed to visit her as she lay dying and skipped her funeral.

  “State business!”

  You then order your guests to dance, Beria with Malenkov, and Khrushchev with Bulganin. After the practical jokes, you begin to fulminate about the doctors’ plot, even though your inebriated colleagues can barely follow you.

  “Idiots! For two years we have known that doctors were plotting to poison and kill members of the Soviet leadership.”

  Fact or fabrication? asks the colonel. Comrade Beria says the latter.

  “All nine of the accused doctors treated major Soviet government and party officials.”

  In failing health.

  “They made it worse, in some cases causing death. The doctors, six of them Jews, were serving the international interests of America and the British intelligence services, as well as the interests of the Jews.”

  Actually, Comrade Stalin, you intended to use the trial of the doctors to launch a massive party purge.

  Stalin looks away.

  Am I right?

  “Purge is an ugly word. It brings to mind an enema.”

  I could tell you were eyeing each of your dinner guests critically. Tell me: What were you thinking?